President Obama: ‘Trayvon Martin could have been me’

Nearly a week after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin, President Barack Obama made his feelings about the situation clear: race and racism had a lot to do with Martin’s death, and the country needs to start grappling with what that means.

In arguably the most direct and personal comments about race he’s ever made as a public official, Obama went deeper Friday into his personal experience than he had in his famous 2008 speech on the issue.

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Obama's full remarks

He spoke of being followed through stores, about hearing people lock their car doors when they saw him coming down the street — him, not “black men,” not “people,” but Barack Obama, a black man himself.

Trayvon Martin wasn’t just the son he might have had, as he said last March. “Another way of saying that,” Obama said in his surprise appearance in the White House briefing room, “is, Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

Obama addressed the issue under some constraint. With the Justice Department exploring civil rights charges against Zimmerman, as Attorney General Eric Holder pledged to do in the wake of the verdict, the president could endanger any future charges by seeming to influence the investigation.

Aware of this, many black leaders had held off publicly pushing the White House to say much, in an effort to avoid sabotaging the only remaining chance to see Zimmerman serve time for Martin’s death.

The president explicitly avoided the legal issues Friday, stressing in a continuing call for calm that he wasn’t going to take issue with the behavior of the people involved in the Florida trial.

“The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a case such as this, reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict,” Obama said. “And once the jury’s spoken, that’s how our system works.”

He could have left it there. He could have heeded his own observation Friday that it wasn’t always “particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations.”

Instead, in unscripted remarks that seemed to embrace his role as the first black president in a way that some concerned about race relations had all but given hope he might, he said clearly, “I do recognize that as president, I’ve got some convening power.”

That power, he said, wasn’t standing in front of the country to present “some five-point plan.” And he admitted Friday that he wasn’t going to get into specifics because he’s “still bouncing around” ideas with his staff.

But even people who’ve criticized him for not saying enough about race say his Friday afternoon comments alone have started to change the conversation.

“What the president is trying so desperately hard to do is to have people acknowledge that we have a great deal of racism in this county,” said Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.). “I don’t think it could be more personal to a black person than when he talks about, Trayvon would look like a son if he had a son, or he could be Trayvon.”

Whatever legislative or other efforts the president might hope to pursue, Rangel said, they’ll never be much use without the kind of frank discussion of racism that Obama embraced on Friday.

“The president has said that the problem that we have in this country is not Zimmerman — it’s what creates the situation of Zimmerman,” Rangel said. “The president has taken advantage of the opportunity to say that we can do better, but we cannot do better if we say there is no problem.”

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who had been among those urging caution to avoid interfering with the DOJ investigation, said he thought the president had managed to do that, while also delivering remarks that would mean a great deal to fellow African-Americans and the country as a whole — balancing “his role as president of the United States and his existence as a black man.”

Jeffries called Obama’s statement “heartfelt, thoughtful, powerful and respectful of the judicial process… He spoke from the perspective of Trayvon in a way that the prosecution failed to do.”